Virgin Mobile US to Bundle Opera Mini

Posted on April 3, 2009 by Dennis Bournique

At CTIA, Opera Software and Virgin Mobile USA (VM) announced a deal where the operator will bundle Opera Mini with future handsets. In the US, Virgin Mobile is a join venture between Richard Branson’s Virgin Group and Sprint/Nextel. Starting April 14th, users of eight current Virgin Mobile phones will be able to download Opera Mini 4.2 for free from the VirginXL on-deck app store. Although eight phones are said to be supported, Virgin has only named four; the Samsung M310 … Continue reading →

SlideShare Mobile – Best Viewed With Opera Mini!

Posted on March 23, 2009 by Dennis Bournique

SlideShare, the site where you can share and view PowerPoint and other presentations online in a web based viewer now has a mobile version at m.slideshare.com It works pretty well as long as you have the right mobile browser. You can search for presentations, view the slides and if you log on, save them online or download them to your phone. Unfortunately, Slideshare is quite picky about what browsers it will play nice with. As far as I can tell, … Continue reading →

AdSense for Mobile Woes

Posted on December 29, 2008 by Dennis Bournique

I’ve been running AdMob’s ads on my mobile sites for a couple of years and have been very happy with both the revenue and AdMob’s service and support. In the last six months though I’ve seen AdMob’s fill rate decline from nearly 100% to about 60% with a corresponding decrease in revenue. I suspect the decline is due to the recession combined with the huge increase in the number of mobile sites and mobile web traffic that has occurred this … Continue reading →

An Easy Way to Retrieve Your Phone’s User Agent

Posted on December 7, 2008 by Dennis Bournique

Whenever I hear about a new phone release I try to test my mobile sites with it, particularly if it carries a new browser like the T-Mobile G1, Blackberry Storm or the Polaris browser found on the Helio Drift and Kickflip. I have no budget for test handsets so I test with the demo phones in carrier owned mobile shops. When I find an issue in testing I capture the phone’s User-Agent string so I can modify my browser detection … Continue reading →

Verizon Using Novarra’s Transcoder

Posted on November 13, 2008 by Dennis Bournique

The largest US mobile carrier, Verizon Wireless has started funneling traffic between Verizon feature phones and the web through a transcoder from Novarra. Verizon calls the service “Optimized View” and has added promotional information and a FAQ to their customer website There is also a page on the carrier’s developer site which has links to a opt-out form and to a PDF document detailing the rules that the transcoder uses to determine which sites to transcode. Given the disastrous effects … Continue reading →

DeviceAtlas Data Explorer

Posted on November 6, 2008 by Dennis Bournique

dotMobi has released a new tool for mobile developers and designers. It’s Data Explorer, an easy way to interactively browse and query the DeviceAtlas database. Device Atlas is dotMobi’s mobile device repository which combines data from 12 sources including WURFL, Volantis, Sony Ericsson, Nokia, Vodafone, Bango and ArgoGroup. Its main purpose is to provide data that mobile developers can use to optimize mobile pages for various devices. Data Explorer is a web based interactive tool that lets you analyze the … Continue reading →

GetJar Visual Bookmarks Update

Posted on October 2, 2008 by Dennis Bournique

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Visual Bookmarks from GetJar.com. It’s a free service which creates a tiny application. When the application is launched it opens your mobile web site in the phone’s browser. The neat thing about that is that it puts an icon linking to your site right in the phone’s main menu. On some phones, including S60 3rd edition ones like the N95, Visual Bookmarks can even be added to the idle screen. In the … Continue reading →

Covering the Mobile Web From 2004 to 2014

Category Archives: Mobile Web Development